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ADDRESS. 



DELIVERED SEPTEMBER 26, 1S50, 



AT SALEM, 



BEFORE THE 



ESSEX AGraCULTURAL SOCIETY, 



BY CALEB GUSHING. 



PUBLISHED BY ORDER OF THE SOCIETY. 

DECEMBER, 1850. 



l/> SALEM: 
Printed at Office of Salem Gazette and Essex Co. Blcuury. 
1850. 



-€^ 



ADDRESS. 

BY CALEB GUSHING 



Mr. President and Gpntlemen of the 

Essex Agricultural Society: — 
It would be presumptuous on my part, to think of ad- 
dressing you on matters of practical agriculture. I choose 
rather to invoke your indulgence for some appropriate reflec- 
tions of another class. 

Allow me, however, in the outset, whilst congratulating 
you on the happy reunion here of so many members of the So- 
ciety, to give utterance to a common grief, in view of the ab- 
sence of one, Avho, honored and esteemed by the community 
at large, was more especially dear to you, both as an associate 
and as a friend. I allude, of course, to your deceased Vice 
President, the Hon. Daniel P. King. 

I have known Mr, King well as a public man, and in that 
respect can speak of him with the precision of personal obser- 
vation. As a statesman, indeed, his memory now belongs not 
to our own Commonwealth only, but to the whole Union. 

He owed to the accidents of birth and of circumstances but 
this, — that he was enabled to pass into the public service with- 
out going through that apprenticeship in active life, or training 
in the learned professions, which, though it sharpen the facul- 
ties, and enlarge the sphere of knowledge, yet has a tendency 
to leave the heart hardened in the conflict of human passions 
and interests, and the mind sophisticated by the habit of seek- 
ing for arguments to maintain an assumed opinion or side, 
in the stead of the unprejudiced exploration of the depths of 
supreme and eternal truth. 

In this, he was favored by fortune : the rest was all his own : — 



4 MR. cushing's address. 

opportunities of education and mental formation faithfully im- 
proved, — scholarly accomplishments, — a graceful and ready elo- 
quence,- — courteous bearing, — candor of judgment, — a spirit 
manly and generous, — firmness of tenet, softened by moderation 
of temperament, — justness of principle, — philanthropy in senti- 
ment and practice not in loud profession, — religion of the heart 
as well as of the head and of the outward life, — equableness of 
general worth, — constancy and uprightness in the performance 
of all his duties, whether to himself, his country, or his God. 

Add to which, that, in him, conscientiousness of political 
conviction was free of that bigotry of party, which in the nar- 
rowness of its myopic perception looks on a difference of sen- 
timent as a crime ; and his earnestness of execution in the line 
of his convictions was unaccompanied by that common form of 
party action, a calculated and self-interested intolerance. 

Thus it was, that he rose to, and well discharged, public 
functions of high eminence, first in the domestic government 
of the Commonwealth, and afterwards for a series of years as 
one of her Representatives in the Congress of the United 
States. His premature death, in the vigor of his age and of 
his faculties, has cut short the career of a wise, good, and pat- 
riotic man, who, had he been longer spared to us, would have 
continued to win true glory in the honorable service of his 
country. 

Of the private virtues of Mr. King as distinguished from 
those qualities which have marked his political life, — of the ex- 
cellence of his character as a son, a husband, a father, a fellow- 
citizen, — it would be unbecoming for me to speak in the mere 
cold terms of public eulogy, here, in the midst of those, by 
whom his memory is cherished, and his death deplored, for 
considerations higher, and more sacred, than all of respect or of 
admiration, which gathers around the name of the departed 
statesman. 

But Mr. King was a farmer, also, with a strong predilection 
for agricultural pursuits, showing by the successful manage- 
ment of his own ample estates, how science may be combined 
with practical skill ; and in that, his professional and official 
relation to you, justly earning the confidence and esteem of 
the Society. 



MR. CUSHING S ADDRESS. 5 

Gentlemen, there is, in my estimation, no condition of private 
life more useful to the community, or more honorable to the 
individual, than the cultivation of the earth. I propose, in 
continuation, to develope this idea, and to exhibit the relations 
of land, its ownership, and its cultivation, to the material 
wealth of nations, to their moral and political welfare, and 
especially to the prosperity and happiness of these United 
States. 

It is impossible that any American should call to mind the 
history of his country, and look abroad on its present condition, 
without feeling a sentiment of exultation in the remembrance 
of the one, and of pride in the contemplation of the other. 

It may be, that something of exaggeration enters into the 
sentiment, it may be that the frequent expression of it has a 
sound of boastfulness to the foreign ear ; yet, as Mr. Everett 
truly and well observes, the feeling and the manifestation of 
it have been most natural to us of this generation, who saw 
eminent men of the revolutionary struggle still lingering among 
us after the nation had already grown into surpassing great- 
ness, thus prolonging our heroic age even into the present 
time. 

This feeling is the more natural, inasmuch as we ourselves 
are the witnesses of a visible, yet marvellous national growth ; 
of populous cities, filled with monuments of art, which have 
sprung up as it were by enchantment from the bare face of the 
wilderness, with the suddenness, but without the transientness, 
of one of the vast oriental encampments ; of great states, with 
their thronging millions of inhabitants, appearing in wide 
lands, where the first furrow was ploughed in the virgin soil by 
the hands of our very fathers ; nay, of an empire, broader than 
Macedonian king or Roman general ever ruled, rising out 
of the earth as if at the stamp of our feet. 

We see that it is not an empire only, but a people, standing 
before us, colossal, glorious, sublime in its supernal majesty, 
with the aureola of divinity flashing from its brow. For that 
people has the highest of the patents of nobility to show for 
itself, as the Spaniard phrases it, namely, its works ; it has taken 
its knightly spurs on the field ; it has gained its blazon of arms in 



6 MR. CUSIIING's address. 

the council-chamber ; it is the child of its own achievements. 
And in thus learning to become great, it has learned the hard- 
er lesson to be great ; for whilst other nations are struggling in 
vain to establish free institutions, wildly tossing their limbs 
in the throes and convulsions of mingled hope and fear, only 
to sink down again into the death-like torpor of despair, we, 
on the contrary, led forward by those great men among us, 
whose solid minds are alike unshaken, whether by the " vultus 
instantis tyranni" or by the "civium ardor prava jubentium," 
have, amidst difficulties unexampled, held on our course in 
conscious strength, proudly dashing behind us the troubled wa- 
ters of discontent and disunion. 

Well, therefore, in such a time as this, might republican 
France look with admiration at the spectacle of the regular 
working of the institutions of this country, when the conquer- 
or of many a Avell-fought and hard-won field of battle bowed 
his head at last before the great conqueror, death, and the su- 
preme power of the Union passed, in tranquillity and peace, to 
the hands of one, having indeed just titles to respect, but not 
of a name so identified with great events, as to make the heart 
throb and the blood run thrilling through the veins, like his 
predecessor, and not therefore equally sure of the spontaneous 
deference of his countrymen. 

And well, therefore, may we say, to the American Union, 
in the exquisite words of one of the sons of Essex : — 

Hope of the world ! May each omen of ill 
Fade in the light of thy destiny still ! 
Time bring but increase and honor to thee, 
Land of the beautiful, land of the free ! 

Nevertheless, it may be right for us to inquire, how much of 
all these grand results, of this rapid growth in power, of this 
happy combination of liberty with order, and of the organic 
perfection of our political system, is due to men, their race, 
character, spirit, institutions, and how much to other causes 
above or beyond all human influences, and what those causes 
are. 

Gentlemen, we hear much in these latter days of the Anglo- 
Saxons, as if it were their blood in us, which makes or explains 
the greatness of the United States. 



MR. CUSHING'S ADDRESS. 7 

Now, I am prepared to concede all its due influence to this 
the Teutonic element in our composition ; but no more. I 
cannot shut my eyes to the action of the Celtic races, Spanish, 
French, and Irish, on the condition of America. 

The characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon stock is individual- 
ism : — in the man, reliance on self, exclusive regard for self, 
personal independence, love of liberty, as it is indefinitely 
called among us, by which we mean, love of individual power; 
in the society, separate dwellings, collection into small political 
groups or communities, quick spread over the surface of a given 
country, occupation of land. 

But in men, as in things, each specific quality excludes its 
opposite. Therefore, in the Anglo-Saxon, with self-reliance 
and self-regard, comes disregard of the rights and feelings of 
others, as illustrated in that habitual violation of contracts 
.among us, which is more or less sanctioned by law and by 
what is called public sentiment. 

Love of personal independence and individual power is, of 
of itself, a complete dissolvent of society. Therefore, again, 
among the Anglo-Saxons, or wherever that element exists 
largely, the central power is weak, authority is diffused among 
the parts, government is carried on, or checked and controlled 
in its action, by voluntary associations, clubs, and political par- 
ties, which tyrannize in their own way. 

In religion, protestantism takes the place of catholicity, that 
is, unity of church disappears, and there follows infinite subdi- 
vision into fragmentary sects, which every where profess, but 
nowhere tolerate, freedom of belief. 

In respect to industrial pursuits, as each man is for himself, 
with freedom of labor there is also freedom of capital ; and as 
the employed rejects or imperfectly admits the idea of obliga- 
tion to the employer, so also the employer feels imperfect- 
ly the sense of obligation towards the employed ; and while 
there is much talk of liberty, there is comparatively little 
thought of either equality or fraternity ; and the dissolution of 
co-relation, thought it involve bankruptcies and adulteration of 
commodities in one class, with pauperism and depredations on 
property in the other, and frequent hostility between both, yet 
comes to be deemed the sum of human happiness. 



8 MR. CUSHINg's address. 

His passion is to occupy land ; but in the indulgence of it he 
is carried away by individualism, and so he takes wherever he 
can, without punctilious regard for the rights of property in 
others ; and, as he is in temper unsocial and repellent towards 
other races, he exterminates or expels the previous occupants. 

In a word, among Anglo-Saxons, the federative principle ob- 
tains; the centrifugal force is stronger than the centripetal ; and 
the society perpetually tends towards anarchy and dissolution. 

Accordingly, there was no such thing as permanent and well 
ordered general government among the Anglo-Saxons, until 
the Norman-French conquered England, and infused into the 
society a portion of the Celtic elements of cohesion by mutual 
relation or co-dependence, and centralization of political au- 
thority. Then, and not until then, did Britain become a pow- 
er in Europe. 

Now, is it because of the Anglo-Saxon blood and character of 
the primitive settlers of these United States, as manifested in 
their political tendencies and in their religion, that these Unit- 
ed States became and have continued to be a great people ? 

I reply, no : race and blood, with inherited instincts or hab- 
its belonging to them, determined the quality, not the fact, of 
greatness. The proof of which is, that the Spaniards, a Celtic 
race, with a genius the opposite of the Teutonic, with central- 
ization of political ideas, co-dependence of social habits, and 
catholic unity of religion, yet in less time than the English, 
and with greater obstacles to overcome, established a more 
magnificent empire in America. 

It required but one hundred years for the Spaniards to bind 
together the two continents in one powerful state, extending 
from ocean to ocean, and from Sante Fe in the North to Val- 
divia in the South, through seventy-five degrees of latitude ; 
to establish definite and equitable relations between the con- 
querors and the conquered ; to christianise the latter ; to create 
in all that vast region rich seaports of maritime commerce : to 
build up refined and populous interior cities ; to organize pro- 
ductive industrial enterprises on the largest and most profitable 
scale ; to construct edifices and establishments of religion, 
government, military defence, education, and philanthropy, 



MR, GUSHING S ADDRESS. 9 

such as to this day exist nowhere else in America, It needs 
only to compare what Spain did in America in the sixteenth 
century with what England did in the seventeenth, and to 
contrast the condition of Spanish America in the year 1600, 
with that of British America in the year 1700, to dispel the 
common delusion among us, which, from partial views and a 
pardonable national vanity, assumes our superior and peculiar 
intrinsic aptitude for colonization and for empire. 

Whoever examines carefully the history and condition of the 
Western and Northwestern States, and sees how, at a time 
when the English still timidly clung to the Atlantic sea-coast, 
and, owing to their repellent qualities of race, were perpetual- 
ly at war with the Indians, at that very time the French, on 
the other hand, had implanted their ideas, their authority, their 
language, and their religion, among the numerous and pow- 
erful tribes of the West, from Canada all around to Louisiana, — 
whoever, I say, considers this, will be inclined to think, that it 
was not any particular line of policy, nor any wide-reaching 
ideas, nor any intrinsic superiority of blood, on the part of the 
Colonies themselves, but the contingencies of a war in Eu- 
rope, which decided the question, whether the predominant in- 
fluences in North America should be English or French, Teu- 
tonic or Celtic. 

We, in New-England, have been accustomed to take a still 
more contracted view of the question, and to over-estimate the 
influence exercised by the peculiar ideas of the Puritans in the 
colonization of America : unjust in this to the Hollanders of 
New-York, to the Huguenots of Carolina, to the Catholics of 
Maryland, to the Cavaliers of Virginia, and to the Irish in all 
parts of the United States. That religion was not the pivot- 
al fact in the successful colonization of the United States may 
be plainly seen by the rapid growth, in our day, of the Austra- 
lian Colonies, which, though unable to boast of any exemplary 
purity in religion or morality, have yet advanced faster in 
population and production than did the Anglo-American Colo- 
nies, 

What, then, is the explanation of the rise, greatness, wealth, 
prosperity, freedom, and stability, of the United States ? I have 
3 



10 MR. cushing's address. t 

no hesitation in saying, that, in my opinion, the main-spring 
of all this is land. The abundance of land has been the pri- 
mary fact in the advancement of Spanish America, Portuguese 
America, French America, and British America, as it has in 
that of Australia. 

I lay down the following series of propositions, in elucida- 
tion of the subject : — 

1. The possession and utilization of land are the natural 
foundations of all society, because, without land, and its pro- 
ductions, life is difficult and precarious, if not impossible. In 
the position thus broadly stated are included, of course, the 
natural products, whether vegetable, animal, or mineral, of the 
air and water as well as the earth. 

2. Manufacture, which is the modification of these products, 
and commerce, which is their distribution by exchange, are 
secondary in order of time and of necessity to the occupation 
of the earth, which alone furnishes dwelling-place and food, 
the prime exigencies of life, and which also furnishes the ob- 
jects of manufacture and commerce. 

3. In all societies, land is the chief conservative element of 
the society, of its institutions whatever they may be, and of 
its particular spirit and moral identity. Whether the govern- 
ment be aristocratical as in Great Britain, or democratical as in 
the United States, its distinctive quality is more particularly 
prominent in the agricultural interest. 

Hence it is that the great empire of the East, whose robust 
identity of type has defied all the chances of time, proof alike 
against external violence and internal corruption for thousands 
of years, — I mean China, — has the unshaken basis of its great- 
ness laid in agriculture, universally recognized by its sages and 
its statesmen as the noblest of their ancestral arts, the palladi- 
um of public stability, the inexhaustible source of national 
prosperity, second in estimation to the cultivation of the mind 
alone : in testimony of which it is, that the one great occasion 
of the year, on which the ruler of three hundred millions of 
men descends from that solitary elevation of his, which is half 
the throne of a sovereign and half the shrine of a demigod, to 
mingle in person with his people; is a solemn agricultural 



MR. GUSHING 'S ADDRESS, 11 

pomp, when he himself guides the plough in the furrow as an 
example and a sign to the universe. 

4. Whatever may be the political name of a government, it 
is monarchical in spirit and fact, if the land be held chiefly or 
in great part by the sovereign, as in Egypt, Russia, or In- 
dia ; it is aristocratic, if it be held in large estates by individu- 
als, as in Great Britain or Hungary ; it is democratic, if it be 
extensively distributed among the people for cultivation, as in 
France or the United States. 

5. A political society will be stable, or otherwise, according 
to the predominance in its composition and control of those 
interests, which are directly associated with the earth and the 
natural productions of land or sea, or of those which consist 
only in the modification or distribution of natural productions. 

Accordingly, countries, like Egypt, India, China, whose pri- 
mary interest is agriculture, seem to possess indestructible vi- 
tality. Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks, have, by 
successive waves of invasion, broken down the monuments of 
art in Egypt, but not her prosperity ,• Mongols and Manchus 
have expended their lust of plunder on the fertile soil of China 
in vain ; Tartars and English have in like manner labored un- 
successfully to exhaust the wealth of India : for if Man be 
powerful to waste and destroy, Nature is yet more powerful to 
renovate and repair. 

6. The tendency of agriculture is to distribute men over the 
country at large, of manufactures and commerce to accumulate 
them in great masses on given points. Of course, in the form- 
er will be found the traits of more simple habits, of a healthier 
state of the moral and physical man, and of less mobility of ideas 
and character : whilst in the latter will be more civilization of 
mind and body, but less vigor and individuality of stamp ; 
more accomplishment in the fine arts, but less virtue ; more 
new ideas, but less of reliable ones ; emotions evanescent, 
though vivid ; movement, change, instability. 

7. If, in a political society, which is wholly or in chief part 
agricultural, the community be divided into two classes, one 
owners of the soil and the other mere laborers, whether that 
state of things result from conquest, as of England by the Nor- 



i^ MR. CUSHING's address. 

mans, and of Ireland by the English, or from the introduction of 
laborers foreign or of another race, as in our Southern States 
and the West Indies, — then, one of two things happens : Eith- 
er the owners and laborers are legally independent of each oth- 
er, and associated only by the contract of hire, in which case 
pauperism is rife ; — or the two classes are mutually co-depen- 
dent, in which case there is no pauperism, but, to compensate 
for this, the laborers are in the condition either of vassalage or 
servitude. 

In all the known, or at least in all the existent, forms of po- 
litical society, this is the terrible alternative, attending unequal 
distribution of property, namely, either serfdom, or pauperism. 
And the great question of the day in Europe is, whether there 
be any middle term ; — whether it be possible so to reconstitute 
society, that the rights of capital and labor may be reconciled, 
and that, with the employer free to engage the employed or 
not as he pleases, and the employed free to engage with the 
employer or not as he pleases, still the employed shah at all 
times have work at a price adequate for his subsistence. That 
is a social problem not yet experimentally solved. 

8. In proportion as productive land is abundant, and easy of 
acquisition by all the members of the community, will society 
be sound on the main point, that is, the absence either of serf- 
dom, or of pauperism, and of the criminal classes created by 
the unequal distribution of limited national wealth. If, in that 
profusion of productive land, there be nothing to check the 
natural progress of population, or it be supplied by coloniza- 
tion, then will there be a rapid growth of the country in pow- 
er. If the land be all taken up, if it be deficient in quantity, 
if manufacturing and commercial interests have overgrown the 
agricultural, then is the condition of the country abnormal ; 
and the continuance of its prosperity is dependent on circum- 
stances foreign to itself, and beyond its control ; and the acci- 
dents of political change may at any moment produce its de- 
cline or downfall. 

In saying this, let me not be understood to speak in dispar- 
agement of manufacture and commerce, those hand-maidens 
of agricuUure ; but only as attributing to each that which is. 



MR. cdshing's address. 13 

in my estimation, its everlasting place in the great scheme of 
human affairs, and in the welfare of nations. 

The higher comparative estimation, in which land has been 
held by some of the great states of ancient and modern times, 
such as Egypt, Laeedaemon, Rome, and feudal Europe, has not 
been, as many have erroneously supposed, a mere prejudice of 
class, but the expression of a sentiment or conviction in favor 
of what they deemed the material element of their greatness 
and the safeguard of their nationality. The old political com- 
munities, whose industry was more exclusively manufacturing 
or commercial, as Tyre, Carthage, Athens, Palmyra, each with 
its narrow territory and its massed civic population, shone for 
a brief season with unsurpassed and dazzling brilliancy in 
wealth, learning, and art, and then passed away like the blaze of 
a meteor, which leaves only the reflection of its transient lustre 
upon the page of history, and perad venture some half-buried 
monumental stones to mark its resting place on earth. Flor- 
ence, Pisa, Genoa, Holland, are examples of more modern date. 
Britain is no exception to this great political law j for, though 
she be pre-eminent in manufacture and commerce, yet the rul- 
ing class there is rooted in the land ; it repairs to the city in 
the pursuit of power and of pleasure, but its rich abodes, its 
household gods, the birth-place and nurture of its children, the 
graves of its progenitors and itself, are in the country ; and 
when the earth of England shall have ceased to produce for 
her its corn, its coal, and its iron, and the landed interest be no 
longer potential in her government, then for her also it will 
need but the accident of a battle to decide her fate. 

Gentlemen, applying these propositions to the main ques- 
tion, I say, these United States are, as a whole, and always 
have been, chiefly dependent for their wealth and power on 
the natural productions of the earth. It is the spontaneous 
products of our forests, our mines, and our seas, and the culti- 
vated products of our soil, which have made, and continue to 
make, us what we are. Manufacture can but modify these, 
commerce only distribute or accumulate them, and exchange 
them for others, to gratify taste or promote convenience. Land 
is the footstool of our power ; land is the throne of our empire. 



14 MR. CUSHINGS ADDRESS. 

Generation after generation may give themselves up to 
slaughter in civil or foreign war ; dynasty follow dynasty, each 
with new varieties of oppression or misrule ; the fratricidal 
rage of domestic factions rend the entrails of their common 
country ; temples, and basilica, and capitols, crumble to dust ; 
proud navies melt into the yeast of the sea ; and all that Art 
fitfully does to perpetuate itself, disappear like the phantasm 
of a troubled dream ; but Nature is everlasting ; and, above the 
wreck and uproar of our vain devices and childish tumults, the 
tutelary stars continue to sparkle upon us from their distant 
spheres ; the sun to pour out his vivifying rays of light and heat 
over the earth ; the elements to dissolve in grateful rain ; the 
majestic river to roll on his fertilizing waters unceasingly ; and 
the ungrudging soil to yield up the plenteousness of its harvest 
year after year to the hand of the husbandman. 

He, the husbandman, is the servant of those divine elements 
of earth and air; he is the minister of that gracious, that be- 
nign, that bounteous, that fostering, that nourishing, that reno- 
vating, that inexhaustible, that adorable Nature ; and as such, 
the stewardship of our nationality is in him. 

God has in all times vouchsafed to our country ministers of 
religion, whose hearts and whose life were touched as with 
holy fire from his altar ; soldiers, of whom the very name 
sounds in the mind's ear as a trumpet-call to battle and vic- 
tory ; statesmen, the glory of whose eloquence, whose wis- 
dom, whose patriotism, will descend to future ages, obscuring 
in the effulgence of its light all Greek and Roman fame. God 
has made us of that Anglo-Saxon race, which Tacitus com- 
memorates of old, as inclined to shun the crowded city, and to 
choose its abodes by the sparkling fountain, or along the green 
glades, or in the solemn depths of the forest ; whose passion is 
land ; whose individualism, whose genius of separation and 
self-action, whose rural tendencies, render it especially apt for 
that period in the career of a political community, when land 
is super-abundant with it, and when the uncultivated earth is 
to be reclaimed to the dominion of man. God has endowed 
us with courage, energy, activity, genius, invention, industry, 
love of knowledge, improvement, and virtue, at least equal to 



MR. cushing's address. 15 

those of the most favored members of the human family. God 
has blessed and protected us in our efforts to establish and 
maintain wise and good institutions of government, and has 
enabled us to defend them against all enemies, alike on the 
ocean and the land. But God in his great mercy has also giv- 
en us a country, geographically speaking, without the singular 
features and situation of which, all the wisdom, virtue, and 
sacrifices of our fathers and ourselves would but have served, 
like those of Swedish Charles, 

To point a moral, and adorn a tale ; 
and without which the specific qualities of our parent-stock, 
their instincts of personal independence, severance of interests, 
diffusion of authority, repellence of race, exaggerated self-con- 
fidence of judgment, intolerance of any opinion, tastes or habits 
differing from their own, and their very avidity for land, would 
all have proved to be the elements of dissolution and destruc- 
tion, rather than of wealth and power. 

We of the United States possess a portion of the earth, in 
which all the natural sources of wealth, mineral or vegetable, 
abound; which constitutes (approximately) the whole of the 
temperate zone of this Continent, and is therefore highly con- 
genial to animal life ; which by the configuration of the sea- 
coast abounds in harbors ; which contains interior seas; and 
whose superficies is so disposed, with numerous moderate ele- 
vations, with no conglomeration of lofty mountains, but with 
extensive gently inclined planes, that it contains a larger sys- 
tem of rivers, and a greater proportion of tillable lands, than 
any other country in the world, except possibly Russia and 
China. 

Compare, for illustration, with the condition of the Ameri- 
can Republic in this respect, the contrary state of things in the 
Mexican. Such is the configuration of the coast of Mexico 
that she has almost no good harbor on the Atlantic ocean. 
Vera Cruz is but a road-stead along the sea-beach, imperfectly 
sheltered by a reef of rocks. You cannot reach the interior of 
the country, and the seats of its natural resources and power, 
from either sea-coast, without ascending to a height of seven 
thousand feet in a line of one hundred miles, and the whole 



16 MR. cushing's address. 

surface of the earth is a confused mass of mountains. Of 
course, navigable rivers, canals, and railways, either to connect 
together the interior parts of the country, or to connect them 
with the sea, are impossible. Of course, also, the relative pro- 
portion of arable land is much less than it is in this country. 
Moreover, as the climate is dry, and the running streams few 
and small, therefore, of the land in general only those portions 
can be cultivated profitably, which are susceptible of irrigation. 
If God had cast the lot of our fathers in that part of America, 
not ours would be the mighty ships, which now bear our flag, 
and the fame of our greatness, and the rich productions of our 
soil, oiu" fisheries, our work-shops, and our looms, to the utter- 
most bounds of the earth ; — not ours, the floating palaces of the 
Hudson, the Delaware, the Ohio, and the Mississippi ; — not ours 
the wonders of mechanic art in the use of the steam engine : — 
not ours, the iron bands of so many railroads, which seem as 
if intended to bind together indissolubly the East and the 
West, the North and the South ; — not ours the great forests and 
vast prairies of the West, which invite and satisfy the expan- 
sive energies of our race, which draw ofl" the superfluity of our 
population, which constitute the safety-valve for all the pent- 
up passions and explosive or subversive tendencies of an ad- 
vanced society, and which in the asylum and aliment they af- 
ford to the discontented or unhappy of other lands, are serving 
to hurry us on to the very j)innacle of earthly power. 

As, therefore, we are great, wealthy, prosperous, and pow- 
erful, so are we, despite of transitory conflicts of interest, peace- 
ful and secure in our political relations, because of land, more 
land, exuberance of land. The Anglo-Saxon must have room 
in space, and his own way in opinion. The colonists of Mas- 
sachusetts-Bay had spread themselves over half the surface of 
the State, at a time, when their aggregate number did not ex- 
ceed the present population of one of our smaller cities ; and 
how little of dissent, either religious or political, they tolerated, 
we know well here in Salem. The people of the English 
Colonies felt crowded on the eastern slope of the Alleghanies, 
and, though most of the land was yet untrodden wilderness, 
they could not find space among them in which to suffer the 



MR. CUSIIING S ADDRESS. 17 

residence of a few broken bfinds of Indians. After the estab- 
lishment of the Federal Union, they swarmed over to the 
western slope of the Alleghanies. They were not satisfied 
there, nntil they had obtained Louisiana, and occupied the en- 
tne Mississippi Valley. And still, with their strong instincts 
of expansion, but not of assimilation, they drove before them 
the surviving remnants of the Indians. There was more land 
yet ahead of them, and they pushed on to Texas, Oregon, New 
Mexico and California. 

Where is all this to end ? I will not undertake to foreknow ; 
but I see that the continual occupation of new lands, and suc- 
cessive acquisitions of territory, are the manifestations and the 
effect of the particular genius and personal character of the 
people of the United States. We satisfy in this the inborn 
exigencies of our nature, just as when we eat or drink. Give 
£cope for the free action of our characteristic national qualities 
of activity, expansibility, individualism, love of land, — and all is 
well : check it, stop it, shut it up, force it back on itself, and 
you will discover that the letter of a written Constitution is 
quite secondary in its agency on the integrity and peace of the 
American Union. 

Gentlemen, we of the State of Massachusetts, unlike the 
United States as a whole, have reached that point in our social 
career, where agriculture is overtaken, and perhaps passed, by 
manufacture and commerce. That is one of the critical periods 
in the life of a community. Far be it from me to say any 
thing, here or elsewhere, to discourage the ardor of our ad- 
vancement in mechanic art, in manufacture, or in commerce. 
Nor, on the other hand, do these need to be stimulated by ap- 
plause ; for their weak side is a tendency to hurtful excess of 
production by means of machinery and of credit. But the in- 
terests of the agriculture of Massachusetts do need to be stimu- 
lated by public exhortation. 

Let those of us, then, who feel stilled in the air of over-full 
cities, to whom the fresh breezes of the country, its green 
fields, its fair hills and bright streams, its woods and its lakes, 
and Its ripened promise of the harvest, are never-ceasingly 



18 MR. cushing's addkess. 

dear, — let us turn with fonder affection to all there is left to 
man of the charms of Eden, We may fail thus to get some- 
thing of city graces : we shall keep the more of country 
strength. Let us hold fast to the sheet-anchor and stay of 
nations. Let science be applied to augment the productive- 
ness and value of the agricultural lands of the Commonwealth, 
as its population increases, and other interests attain great rel.-t- 
tive weight ; to which end, the State should be called on to 
establish an Agricultural School worthy of her wealth and 
fame. If our soil will not produce, nor the climate ripen, those 
great staples which supply our foreign trade, cotton, tobacco, 
sugar, wheat, rice, yet other products of the earth are not want- 
ing here, as the means and the subject of agricultural industry 
and prosperity. Let it never be forgotten that agriculture is 
the conservative element in our social system, under whatever 
name of party that interest may for the time being appear. 
Finally, if we should ever incline to doubt as to the relation of 
agriculture to life, to the character of men, and to the destiny 
of nations, let us look back on the history of our country, and 
remember how many of its greatest generals, like Washington, 
Jackson, Taylor, — how many of its greatest statesmen, like 
Jefferson, Madison, Calhoun, — to say nothing of living men, — 
have been the production and growth of rural life, and have 
clung, with invincible tenacity, amid all the changes and 
chances of the loftiest flights of greatness, to the pursuits and 
the interests of their mother-earth. 



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